Let there be light.
—GOD
With this sentence, God sets in motion everything we know. Emerging from the traumatic events of the Babylonian exile, ancient Israelites drew on Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths to write the first chapters of what we now know as the book of Genesis. With stunning metaphor, these early theologians reassured their battered people of their place in God’s heart. Creation emanates from within God, they wrote, as divine speech. We are the music God sings, the lyric that catches you by surprise when you find your deepest longing, your hardest loss, your most intense pleasure being sung aloud. Our universe is God’s poem, intricate, sometimes cryptic, sometimes gritty, sometimes soaring with beauty, always alive, always being enunciated.
The myth of creation found in Hebrew scripture is designed to point us to truths about God, truths that are too difficult for our relative-to-God pea brains to comprehend fully, scientifically. The ancient Israelites, of course, were focused on a God whom they considered all-powerful, all-wise, all-knowing. For them, it was a revelation to contemplate the idea that this all-powerful God cared about creation, about us puny human beings. Conceiving the idea that God could actually love this creation, and call the Hebrew people—speaking personally to Abraham, to Moses—this was one of those moments when something changed for the human race. Right then, we evolved in our thinking. When you read scripture, both Hebrew and Greek, you always have to keep in the back of your mind the historical moments out of which these texts emerged, and the revolutionary ideas they were boldly proclaiming.
Several millennia later, those who read scripture bring other perspectives to bear. It is common today for people to feel that God is intimately bound up in our daily lives, to feel personally loved by this astonishing Spirit.
Viewing God that way, it is possible to wonder what creation was like for God. Not merely to assert, as the ancients did, that God viewed this creation favorably; but to imagine God wanting this creation, loving it, feeling both thrill and satisfaction when the stars began to glow, when that human creature’s chest expanded with God’s breath and . . . wait for it, wait . . . inhaled on hir own for the first time.
I have this vivid memory of my first child lying on a bed when he was just a few months old. He rolled over, for the first time. My reaction was amazement, delight, followed immediately by something almost akin to foreboding. My son was already a little perpetual motion machine, and now suddenly he would be able to get places on his own. I remember my exact thought: “Our lives have just changed completely, and forever.”
Maybe the earliest moments of human agency were like that for God. God created us in Hir own image. We were part of God. And suddenly, we had our own power. We could think for ourselves where we wanted to go, and we could begin figuring out how to get there.
In order to create us, God took a risk. Not a small risk. A big risk. We don’t know anything about what God had before then, so it’s impossible to estimate the actual content of that risk. But it is safe to say this: God created us out of love. God had hope for us. And in a moment that may have compared to the ways that we risk for love, God put God’s heart on the line for us.
Risk is what happens when you have something that you value and you take a chance with it, hoping to achieve something of greater value. Identity-based risks involve putting on the line something that is part of you, hoping to get a return on that investment that will also be part of you. These kinds of risks are particularly bracing, and particularly important. Scripture describes a God who models this exquisitely. Speaking creation into existence, breathing Hir own life into it, God watches and waits to see what will happen next. What will we do? Where will we go? What risks will we take on behalf of love?
Not everyone in our various queer communities believes that queerness is a matter of identity. Queer theory argues that gender expression is less about identity and more about performance, and that gender is a construct.1 This is important work, which addresses my simultaneous knowledge from childhood that I was a girl, and yet the qualities that people associate with “girlness”—the fashions, the demeanor—didn’t fit me. Over the past thirty years, many people—from performance artists to philosophers to theologians—have pushed this insight further. They have so provocatively challenged societal attachments to these constructs as to suggest that the only way truly to rupture the binary of male and female is to dispense with them as essential categories—identity markers—at all. This is a foundational conversation in the art of queering, and there is no small liberation in it. When it becomes a conscious act, performance takes guts; especially when it bucks the tide of conventional perception or prescribed roles. It matters that we claim the power to choose how to present ourselves to the world—not just queer people, but all of us.
Numerous clerics inside Roman Catholicism have in recent years been lifting up what they call “gender theory,” mischaracterizing academic conversations about gender and identity in stridently alarmist terms.2 Even Pope Francis joined the fray, a discouraging move after his refreshing efforts to shine pastoral light into the dank spaces of LGBTQ exclusion.3
Such blatant fearmongering by religious conservatives merely strengthens the resolve to claim queerness itself as an identity marker. My experience tells me plainly that something deep is at work in the ways many of us make our sexual identities visible to the world. How we appear to the world is connected to something inside us. It is not merely “who I present myself to be,” but is more truly “who I am.”
Revealing oneself authentically always carries potential risk, however remote. Most human beings could tell stories not just about the risk of authenticity, but about times when they revealed themselves and were burned as a result. Many people, not just queer people, know what it is to risk something far greater than social embarrassment simply by walking down the street being who they are.
Queer people have a particular relationship to risk. Our need to be honest about our identities is not merely an ethical exercise. In order to find deep, intimate connection—which is to say, in order to love and be loved deeply, intimately—we have to reveal ourselves. This means that the stakes are high before we have even said a word.
Different kinds of queerness can entail very different levels of visibility. We often have some power to choose how we reveal ourselves, power that we exercise deliberately. Virtue is cultivated when one repeatedly chooses to step into a place of risk in order to live authentically into one’s identity. For a trans* man, for instance, this may begin with a decision early in the discernment process to get a wicked short haircut and start wearing a tie. For a bisexual person, it may be the first time she openly confronts someone’s casual assumption that the sex of the person she is with is a sweeping indicator of the kind of person she desires.
By living into our identities in any way whatsoever, we consciously enter a place of risk. Whatever that first risky step looks like, however cautiously modest, one thing is certain: at some point the risk will be grave, the danger real. The risks, the dangers, can be social, but they may also be—are very likely to be—physical, sexual, economic, emotional, legal, professional, familial, and most assuredly spiritual.
To live a queer life is to put oneself at risk—among family members, at work, on the street, and even in our homes. Telling the truth about queer identity takes courage. Embarking on the quest to find other queer people can be frightening, even perilous. If Christians understand and respect nothing else about queer experience, they should recognize this: proclaiming what you know to be true—especially in the face of hostility and ridicule—takes guts. Many queer people have a visceral understanding of Jesus’s words, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it. . . . For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”4
Nowhere do we walk the walk of faith more than in our quotidian decisions to live openly, visibly—on the streets, in our jobs, everywhere. Being out in a hostile world requires trust in something more important, and thus more secure, than physical safety. It may be a prioritization of one’s identity—“I have to be who I am.” It may come from a sense that it simply matters to tell the truth—a prioritization of one’s integrity. And it may come from the knowledge that things will only change—for me, for all of us—by risking hits on ourselves individually as we witness to a larger truth: that our identities, our integrity, have value. This is rooted in the knowledge that one’s truth is a part of a larger truth, and at some point this larger truth will win out.
This is fine to say—“Truth will win out in the end”—and I do honestly believe it. But that fine sentiment does not in any way diminish the hard fact that queer people take enormous risks simply by being ourselves in the world. And I don’t just mean the occasional socially awkward moment. There are queer people who live in actual physical danger the world over.
In 2014 engaging in same-sex sexual activity was a criminal offense in more than seventy-five countries across the globe.5 People convicted of violating these laws could be put to death in at least five countries, including the US ally nations of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. One nasty remnant of British colonialism is Section 377, an antisodomy law written into the penal codes of British-occupied states. More than thirty countries still have on the books either Section 377 or a law modeled on it, including Singapore, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Jamaica.
The persistence of these laws is unnerving to queer people and our allies. In many countries these are not mere statutory relics of a bygone colonial era, but are actively enforced with severe consequences. Even in countries that do not criminalize homosexuality explicitly, such as Egypt, queer people have in recent years been prosecuted for “debauchery” or other vague charges.6 The drumbeat of state-sponsored violence remains background noise in the lives of LGBTQ people across the globe, marching us backward from the progress that we have made in trying to build a more just and less violent world.
In one three-month span from December 2013 to February 2014, queer people were assailed by the following news items: The Supreme Court of India reaffirmed the constitutionality of India’s Section 377, overturning a 2009 ruling that had decriminalized homosexuality, and “once again making gay sex a crime punishable by up to ten years in jail and putting tens of millions of Indians at risk of prosecution or harassment.”7 The Olympic Games in Sochi drew international attention to a then-recent Russian law that criminalized alleged pro-LGBTQ propaganda. And these headlines appeared in international news sources: “Museveni Says He Plans to Sign Anti-Gay Law after All”;8 “Wielding Whip and a Hard New Law, Nigeria Tries to ‘Sanitize’ Itself of Gays”;9 and “Mob Attacks More Than a Dozen Gay Men in Nigeria’s Capital.”10
For queer Christians, the queerphobic laws in Uganda and Nigeria particularly sting. This is partly because the Ugandan law that passed in 2013 was so draconian, partly because Uganda was at one time considered a model success story in the fight to stem HIV/AIDS, and largely because the laws were supported by so many religious leaders, including the Anglican archbishops in both countries. These archbishops had taken highly visible leadership roles excoriating the Episcopal Church in the United States for consecrating Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop in 2003. The rift in the Anglican Communion threatened to become a schism. The archbishop of Nigeria at the time was scathing in his indictment of any notion of a queer-tolerant Christianity, asserting that the ordination of openly gay priests is “an idea sponsored by Satan himself and being executed by his followers and adherents who have infiltrated the church.”11
We do not have to look to nonwestern nations for constant news of queerphobic assaults. The New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), which works to prevent and respond to violence against and within queer and HIV-affected communities in New York, charts these crimes on a continuous basis. On August 17, 2013, Islan Nettles, a trans* woman of color, was beaten to death in central Harlem. On May 17, 2013, Mark Carson, an openly gay man, was shot and killed in Greenwich Village, surely one of the most gay-friendly neighborhoods in the world.
These laws and attacks got a lot of attention when they were first reported, but they were not new then, and they are not unusual. What is shocking is that for all the change we have seen, for all the movement on legal and social fronts, we don’t seem to make a dent in curbing the violence being perpetrated against LGBTQ people.
Catherine Shugrue dos Santos is the director of client services at AVP and deeply sensitive to the ways violence can be amplified against people who face multiple forms of bias. “As a queer person, I know what it’s like to be afraid of rejection, or even for my safety because of who I am,” she recently stated. “But as a White cisgender woman, I have to be honest with myself and admit that I don’t know how I would handle the amount of violence directed, for instance, at trans* women of color. I’m not talking about discomfort. I’m talking about actual physical danger. Think of how much safety planning has to go into the simplest daily activity, like walking to get groceries.”
The danger is real. In 2012 the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) documented more than two thousand incidents of hate violence against LGBTQ people in the United States. Transgender women were twice as likely to experience discrimination, threats, and intimidation as survivors who did not identify as transgender women, and transgender women of color were nearly three times as likely to experience police violence compared to white cisgender survivors.12
Shugrue dos Santos reminds us that it is a privileged idea that “safety is normal.” And not just on the streets. Of hate violence reported to the NCAVP, the highest number of incidents are those perpetrated by landlords, tenants, or neighbors. Second highest are those perpetrated by employers or coworkers.13 Safety is indeed not normal, not for the vast majority of people in the world, and certainly not for most queer people—not even in our homes and workplaces.
Christianity takes dead aim at the impulse to amass power and privilege in pursuit of security, a concept that includes personal safety. This is partly for spiritual reasons—Christians are taught to rely on God, not on our stuff, for safety. But Christianity also recognizes that there is a reciprocal relationship between the quest for privilege and the inequality that breeds unsafe conditions for everyone. While gated communities may tempt their inhabitants into insidious spiritual complacency, the wealth that is being guarded there also saps resources from those who live outside the gates. The Christian gospel thus recognizes that privilege run amok actually makes most people less safe than they might be in a more economically just society. This is true for LGBTQ people, but it is also true for young men of color, women of all ages, children in the developing world—everyone, really, who is not cloistered behind those gates.
No authentic read of Christianity can fail to comprehend the tradition’s analysis of these economic dynamics. But the tradition does not stop at economics when making truth claims about our safety and security. Christianity also recognizes the degree to which spiritual fears make people unsafe.
It sickens me how effectively fear of sexual difference continues to be used as a weapon against my people. This is a deep and disturbing spiritual malaise that afflicts not only perpetrators of violence, but also and far more heartbreakingly the people who find themselves in its crosshairs. In 2011 Michael Bacon, a priest, began to compile news reports of young people who had killed themselves, or tried to, because they were being bullied. Within a few weeks, Michael had uncovered approximately seventy accounts of youth suicides in countries across the globe. Thirty-five were reported in the press to be gay. He found multiple instances of girls killing themselves as couples. It is not a surprise, though it should be, that several of the news accounts included explicit reference to religious-based taunts, or worse, queerphobic quotes from local pastors.
Given the role that spiritual violence plays in the decisions of these young people to end their lives, it is fair to ask why progressive churches are not doing more to prevent their deaths. The need is real, and it is urgent.
Ignoring the roots of such violence leaves a shameful and lasting record, one that can be seen clearly in other historical moments. For example, in 2015 the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report that documented nearly four thousand racial terror lynchings in the United States from 1877 to 1950.14 The report gained widespread press attention when it was released, not just because the numbers were much higher than had been previously documented, but also because the authors characterized these lynchings as a form of terrorism against African Americans. The threat of lynching, the report notes, led to the “forced migration of millions of black Americans out of the South.”
The report asserts that most terror lynchings had one or more common features, the first of which is “a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex.”15 Which is to say, terror lynchings depended upon and deliberately ignited white society’s fear of the rupturing of racial and sexual binaries that were built into Southern power structures and designed to maintain white dominance.
The national tide that finally turned against lynching was led by people of diverse races,16 mostly Christians whose disgust at lynching was informed by their religious convictions. The most active white-led organization, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, was organized specifically to rebut and condemn the lie that lynching was perpetrated in order to “protect” Southern women. But white Christian antilynching efforts stopped short of confronting the troubling correlation between rural evangelical Christianity and rural lynching,17 nor did they challenge “the narrative of racial difference that is the most enduring evil of American slavery.”18
For some in the 1930s, the decision not to challenge pernicious racial binaries was a calculated move to advance important political ends. But by failing to proclaim a Gospel that would confront and dismantle the conceptual underpinnings of racial terrorism, Christian leaders ceded the most potent instrument of their moral authority. The legacy of this theological vacuum continues to affect people’s real lives, disturbingly, to this day.
The violence directed at queer people differs substantially from the reign of racial terror that fueled an African American exodus from the American South. In the United States, there is nothing in queer experience that compares to the moral abomination that was the institution of slavery, to the terror that it bred, and to its legacy of dehumanizing violence.
The weapons against queer people differ not just in scale from those used in acts of racial terror, but also in method. Because we are seldom born into queer families, many of us spend years alone before we find queer community. Those who would terrorize us have thus crafted weapons that pick us off individually before we have found our people. Though queer people certainly are forced to deal with external threats of violence, the terrorism directed at us relies heavily on weapons that we ingest with our minds, hearts, and souls. They are spiritual weapons. Delivered relentlessly over a course of years, these weapons prove to be so spiritually corrosive that many queer people take their own lives to escape the inflicted pain and internalized shame. Some queer youth do indeed flee north, or west, to find safe harbors in urban centers with large LGBTQ communities. But others simply flee the world that has bullied them relentlessly and condemned them as evil.
This is terrorism at work. It is spiritual terrorism, and the voices that are most urgently needed to combat this terrorism are the voices of religious authority.
It is good for churches to be inclusive of queer people, but it is not enough. It is important for clergy to be pastoral to queer people, but it is not enough. What is needed now is a bold, pastoral, explicitly Christian response that does what white antilynching activists were not willing to do with regards to race: rupture the false binaries that are employed to demonize queer identity. It matters that we preach not only that the violence is wrong and anti-Christian, but also why it is wrong and anti-Christian.
Having named those deadly binaries, explicitly, as an affront to the queer God whom we Christians worship, we must then create liturgical moments that honor the lives of queer people—those who have survived, and those who have not. Michael Bacon’s spiritual community determined that it would mark the deaths he had uncovered with prayer and vigil. He created a binder with photos of these young people, telling their stories. Paging through it is an exercise in heartbreak. His community used the visual presentations as the centerpiece of a month-long series of masses, concluding with a requiem. I attended this requiem and will not forget it. Bacon’s words reverberate still: “To each gay child or youth who has taken his/her life, let us not say, ‘Rest in peace.’ Let us say, ‘Our rage at your fate remains undiminished; our prayer is that in the other place you live the life of which you were deprived here, one of fullness, joy, and love.’”
My queer identity is a source of such immense joy for me that I almost can’t comprehend how it could lead to suicidal self-hatred. And yet, of course I understand it. I understand it completely. All you have to do is stop tuning out the background noise of violence and listen, simply listen, to the violently queerphobic words on the lips of people who bear the mantle of spiritual authority.
When you listen, what becomes truly amazing is that any of us ever come out at all. And yet we do, in waves that have gotten stronger and stronger, throughout the entire world.
Why do we do this?? Why do we persist in telling our truth? Why would anyone choose to put themselves in the path of bullying, of professional danger, of familial rejection, of assault on the street? Why do we go to the lengths we do, making the safety plans, enduring the taunts, tuning in the headlines and organizing to make this world a place where we are able not just to live but fabulously shine?
Well, why do we do it? I believe that the answer is tied up in another deeply theological concept: hope. Hope is vital to the human heart, and it matters to understand what it is, and what it isn’t.
When I graduated from seminary, I landed a job as chaplain to the AIDS Health Services unit at Jersey City Medical Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. This was 1991, the height of the AIDS pandemic in the United States. There were no drug cocktails that kept opportunistic infections at bay. An HIV diagnosis back then meant that death was almost certainly around the corner. Jersey City had the highest rate of HIV infection in the country for a city its size, and Medical Center was deep in the inner city. In the four years that I worked there, more than six hundred people in our service died. Children, women, men. Black, white, brown.
Death from HIV/AIDS was like nothing I had seen before, or since. If allowed to run rampant, the virus wipes out a body’s immune system, thwarting its ability to fight germs that would be turned away at the gate by healthy, well-armed immunities. Back then we watched helplessly as infection after infection took hold. None who were on the front lines as patients, survivors, and professional caregivers will ever forget the sights and smells of human decay that we witnessed. This was especially true for those of us who served inner-city patients, whose decline was often intensified by a raft of other poverty-related complications. But neither, I suspect, will any of us ever forget the moments of stunning human dignity displayed by people who refused to let the disease be all that defined them.
One of the patients I met in the hospital was Celia, a young Latina woman. She arrived early in her battle with HIV. When I met her in her hospital room, she was sick but attractive, articulate, and filled with life. She told me that she had recently joined an evangelical church. The folks in this community had stepped up to provide considerable support to Celia and her family. In my experience in the hospital, this was a rarity. I hardly ever ran into members of the clergy visiting my patients. I suspected that this was a mutual decision: clergy didn’t want to visit my patients, but they weren’t necessarily welcome, either. The vast majority of my patients who belonged to a church at some point in their lives had eventually been burned by it. Local congregations had little interest in serving gay men, and less interest in serving folks involved in the IV drug culture that was savaging their neighborhoods.
I was intrigued by Celia’s experience being embraced in this church. She and I talked at length. What became apparent was that the church had taken her on as something of a test case. They were determined to heal her of her HIV infection through prayer. Given how vibrant she was, I could easily imagine their thinking: “If anyone can be cured, she can.”
In our conversations, Celia talked about hope. She still had big dreams for her life, so when she used the word “hope,” she meant a lot of things: hope that she would live a long life, hope that she would do work that was valuable, hope that her life would have meaning. What gradually became clear was that the folks in her church defined “hope” as something much more specific: hope that Celia would one day test HIV negative.
Over the course of months, Celia’s immune system began to crash. As she got sicker, members of her church began to peel away. She kept her chin up, refusing to disparage these people for abandoning her. Our work together took a deeper and harder turn as she grappled with her sense that she had failed, that she had let these people down. We were still talking about hope, and the challenge before me was daunting. Could I help Celia unshackle herself from the narrow definition of hope imposed on her by this church? How do you talk about hope with someone who is dying? What is hope, anyway? What can any of us reasonably hope for in this life?
When Celia told me that she had finally accepted that her hope was unrealistic, I hit a wall. The one thing I believed about hope, the one thing I knew absolutely to be true, was that “hope” and “real” do not and cannot stand opposed to each other. A person may wish for things that don’t come to fruition, but “hope” exists. By definition, there is no such thing as “false hope.”
The question of hope was something that virtually every single one of my patients was wrestling with at some level. So I prayed for understanding. I studied scripture. I listened carefully to my patients. I talked at length with the nuns and priests and other caregivers who were my colleagues in AIDS ministry.
The answer came from an unexpected source. I went to see Frank Darabont’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Shawshank Redemption. There is this moment when Andy, the character played by Tim Robbins, commandeers the warden’s office to broadcast an aria over the prison’s PA system. Movement in the yard stops as prisoners look up and listen. For a moment you can see the men transported beyond the walls. Andy gets two weeks in solitary for the stunt. When he gets out, he tells other inmates that he survived it by listening internally to a Mozart piece that he knew by heart. He asks if any of them use music in that way. Red, played by Morgan Freeman, scoffs at him. The derision takes Andy by surprise. He struggles to articulate what he means. “You need [music] so you don’t forget that there’s something inside they can’t get to, that they can’t touch, that’s yours.” Red asks warily, “What are you talking about?” Andy looks him in the eye. “Hope.”
I knew instantly that this was what I’d been struggling to grasp. Hope for these prisoners wasn’t that they would one day get out. It was the knowledge that some part of them wasn’t locked up. For my patients, true hope wasn’t the possibility that someday they would be cured; it was the knowledge that some part of them wasn’t sick.
I wish I could tell you that I brought this insight to Celia and she immediately got it, that her decline from there on out was a peaceful one, that she died with a level of spiritual freedom. But my memory is that she sort of faded away after the folks in that church gave up on her. Once a religious community steps in to tell you what to believe about yourself, what to hope for, what hope is, it is very hard to put those ideas down. This is one of the most important reasons that the rallying cry for LGBTQ people is “Pride,” a concept that is shot through with hope. We long ago learned to stop listening to the disparaging messages being pounded into us by folks with religious authority. We learned to claim the authority to tell the truth about ourselves, and we learned to celebrate our identities as both valid and valuable.
When a queer person comes out—that is, tells the truth of her life—that person is living into hope. Whatever risk she takes, she has to believe that some part of her will survive whatever happens next, that some part of her is stronger than the hate and the intimidation and the violence.
Risk taking can be a form of thrill seeking, but that’s not the kind of risk I’m talking about now. I’m not talking about recklessness, either. I’m talking about the kind of risk you take because you are caught up in truth, and you simply have to trust it, tell it, live into it. That’s the essence of faith—trusting in something that you know to be true. Solidly true. True in a way that is both inside you and bigger than you. You see, faith isn’t trust in the idea that you will be safe (that “safety is normal,” as Shugrue dos Santos says). It is trust in the idea that some part of you—the truth in you—will survive no matter what death-dealing violence is directed at you.
This kind of risk is the verb form of faith. It is the lived iteration of trust in something bigger than your immediate security, bigger than whatever threat exists to your security. Risk isn’t just a by-product, an inevitable consequence of actions that push you out of a comfortable zone. It is the means itself, the requisite stuff, the fuel, the essence.
Queer people may not always understand risk this way, but Christians must. For queer people it can be as much a source of terror as of joy. But for Christians, this kind of risk is part and parcel of love, which is the primary impulse, purpose, and mission of our tradition; of the God whom we worship. It is where we locate our hope, a hope that “does not disappoint us,” as Paul says;19 a hope that never fails.
We Christians talk about God as love. We talk about love as the glue that holds our community together, that identifies us to the world. Yet one seldom sees in a church anything approaching the risks that queer people take every day for the sake of love. When Christians do offer this kind of witness, the power of authentic Christianity becomes immediately visible even to secular observers. In June 2015 leaders of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, welcomed a stranger, a young white man, and engaged him in dialogue about scripture. As he began to spew racist invective and pulled a gun, they met his hateful violence with love and courage.
In his eulogy for Emanuel’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, President Obama eloquently described this encounter and the impact it had on people who heard the story. “Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group—the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could never have anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court—in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. . . . The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston . . . how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond—not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.”20
Many factors played a role in the public introspection and self-examination that the president describes, but perhaps the most significant was simply the integrity and courage shown by the people of this church as a church. “Emanuel does not harbor hate in her heart,” the sister of one victim was quoted as saying. “That’s not the God we serve.”21 The people of this church witnessed to their faith in such a God: faith that demands material risk that is qualitatively similar to the risks that queer people take on a daily basis throughout the world.
Queer people risk in this way for ourselves, but we also do it for one another. Like the people of Emanuel Church and so many others involved in movements toward justice, we do it because we know that the only way not to be crushed by persecution is to recognize that our connection to one another paves the road to our survival. It is the way we may someday establish a better, more just world, but it also allows those of us who are killed to live on. And so we risk, knowing that we are part of a life, a love, a truth, that cannot die.
This is a complex way of understanding what safety is, because it stands on its head the conventional notion that security is about making your body safe. This is an inversion, in which “security” is best achieved by putting yourself at risk. It is more than an inversion: it is the rupturing of a binary in which “safety” and “risk” stand in opposition to each other.
And this particular rupturing, this queering, exists at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The entire multimillennial history of both Judaism and Christianity comes back again and again to make the point that true security rests in our reliance on God alone. Indeed, these traditions grapple almost obsessively with the human temptation to forego reliance on God in favor of reliance on something—someone, some weapon, some empire—other than God. Virtually the entire canon of history and prophecy in Hebrew scripture and the entire narrative of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is a sustained meditation on this very theme: reliance on God makes possible justice, love, life; while failure to rely on God—which is to say, fear of relying on God—breeds injustice, enmity, and death.
Am I equating reliance on God with the queer impulse to tell the truth about one’s identity, to walk the streets being who one is, even in the face of intimidation and violence? You bet I am. This business of perceiving yourself caught up in a truth that exists inside you and is bigger than you—that is the essence of what it is to rely on God, to know God, to live in the thrall of God’s astonishing, transgressive power. This is not to say that queer identity is the same thing as the identity of being God’s creature. Clearly there are lots of people who are God’s creatures who are not queer. It is to say that risking for the sake of truth is a sacred enterprise, and one can risk in this way for many reasons of which queerness is most assuredly one.
Queer virtue is a path that begins with discernment of an identity. Taking the risk to speak our identities out loud is the next crucial step on that path. It is a step that most of us, perhaps all of us, take over and over again. Coming out never ends. At the same time, this path is one that you get better at. If this is a step you have not taken, if you are still in a place where the fear or the danger is still just too great, I can promise you this: it does get easier the more you practice, the more you live openly as part of your daily life. I count myself blessed to live in New York, to work in a politically progressive office, to have the support of my church and my bishop. All of this has made it so much easier to be myself. My life has not always been like this. Many of us—perhaps most of us—have paid terrible prices for our honesty along the way. The ease of so many of our lives now is bolstered by the years we have spent paving roads, building spaces and relationships that afford a measure of safety. It really pays off. At this point in my life I am so accustomed to being out that I can’t remember the last time I indicated to someone that I was gay and was conscious of doing so.22
But even if coming out is now pretty much de rigueur for me, queering—in the sense of rupturing binaries—is not. That I still have to do intentionally most of the time. It is not always easy; it is not always comfortable; and it sometimes involves terrifying risk. For good reason. Queering is itself dangerous, pushing people out of conventional comfort zones. I was recently reminded that in my childhood, the term “transgressive” would have indicated not something thrilling, but something dangerous, taboo, and even illegal. Fifty years ago, right here in the United States, people who challenged those big binaries—male/female, black/white, communist/capitalist—were widely considered to be criminals. The dangers they faced were often imposed by the police and court system, as well as by a disparaging society.
There have always been religious leaders who recognized that the impulse to question binaries is embedded in an authentic read of the Christian tradition. So it is both sad and ironic that the danger to those who queer today often emanates from people claiming to espouse or defend Christian faith.
Here’s an example of deciding, intentionally, to queer something in the church.
Back in 2013 I was scheduled to preach at what was then my home church, All Saints Episcopal Parish in Hoboken, New Jersey. In the Episcopal Church, we follow a lectionary, a three-year cycle of biblical readings. When you agree to preach on a given Sunday, you are handed four biblical texts: one from Hebrew scripture, a Psalm, an Epistle, and one of the Gospels. The sermon is usually a reflection on one or more of these assigned readings. On this particular Sunday the gospel passage was Jesus and his mother at the wedding in Cana.23 In the Episcopal wedding liturgy for heterosexual couples the priest begins by saying that “our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” Now, if you ask me, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that just because Jesus was at this wedding, he intended his presence to be a permanent endorsement of the institution of marriage. If he had actually gotten married, it would be more persuasive. He didn’t, at least not that we’re aware of. The point is that I had avoided this text for years because of its association with a sacrament that until recently had been completely off limits to LGBTQ people. Finally, that Sunday, I decided to take it on.
As I started working with the text, I saw something amazing going on, something that had nothing to do with weddings, heterosexual or otherwise. What I saw was Jesus taking these pots of water—water designed for ritual bathing, for spiritual cleansing—and turning that water into wine that everyone was supposed to drink. What I saw was Jesus taking this substance that was all caught up in ideas of cleanness and uncleanness, all caught up in notions about what separates us from each other, and turning it into something designed to be shared, something that eases our anxiety about all the harsh lines in our world, something we take into our bodies in order to overcome barriers like ritual purity laws that separate us from one another.
What I saw was Jesus queering those pots of water.
So that became my sermon: a queer reading of the wedding at Cana. I was so deliciously intoxicated by the queering in this story that I knew I had to be explicit about it. And I also knew that there would be lots of churches where a sermon like that would get me fired. I was pretty sure that I would not get fired at All Saints, because I was 100 percent certain that my boss, Geoff Curtiss, would have my back. Even so, when I ran into him in the sacristy that morning the first thing I said was, “Geoff, I would like to apologize up front for the guff you are going to take for the sermon I am about to preach.” Geoff laughed. He taught me a lot that day about the role that straight allies can play in giving cover to us queerfolk as we do this radical, unpredictable work of queering.
Because we need cover for this. Simply naming our perspective as “queer” is more than a lot of parishioners can handle. One of the easiest ways that progressive denominations could ignite interest in the binary-busting aspects of Christian theology would be to free up queer clergy to proclaim the Gospel from an explicitly queer perspective, boldly and honestly. Let us be ourselves, and assure us that you will have our backs when our proclamation unsettles and afflicts those who are comfortable in a dualistic worldview.
Queering itself is risky business. To reject easy binaries is to enter into uncertain terrain. The discomfort of such liminal space is often at the heart of the fear that erupts in violence against queer people—violence that may be physical, or legal, or ecclesial, or economic. You really can get fired for it, even in denominations that pride themselves on being gay friendly.24 Lots of priests and pastors have.
And that’s just so many shades of wrong, because in fact, busting those false dichotomies is part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is one of the bedrock reasons I am a Christian and love my tradition so much. Christianity pushes me right off that cliff of comfortable binaries all the time, and I need that. It is sometimes ridiculously hard, and egregiously painful, and sometimes it simply pisses me off. “Love my enemy? Do good to those who persecute us? How could love and persecution possibly coexist??”
The Judeo-Christian Bible begins with a mythic account of creation. Out of the realm of heaven, beyond time and space, God speaks the created order into existence. Something of immense power passes back and forth between, among these realities of time and space, and since it began, it has never stopped. If you have ever truly prayed, truly meditated, casting aside your firm grip on your solid existence, you know. If you have ever found yourself transported to another dimension by an extraordinary piece of music, you know. However you got there, whatever has carried you there, if you have ever let yourself enter that other place of reality, you know: It exists, and we have access to it. It has access to us.
This is how the myth of creation starts. Then the Bible tells the story of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people. The entire narrative of our faith begins with God calling Abraham to leave his home and all that he knows in search of something, he knows not what. A millennium or so later the apostle Paul points to Abraham’s risk-taking faith as a model for future generations. Abraham risks everything, says Paul, “being fully convinced that God was able to do what [God] had promised. Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’”25
It matters that we understand what it is that Abraham gets right here. Or rather, it matters not to misunderstand. A lot of people think that Abraham models blind obedience to God. That is a misinterpretation that then gets carried into one of the hardest stories in scripture: Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son, Isaac.26 God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and Abraham unquestioningly prepares to do just that. The dramatic tension builds and builds as we wait to see whether Abraham is actually going to do this dreadful thing. At the very last moment, with Abraham grasping the knife, poised to plunge it into Isaac’s small body, an angel steps in to grab Abraham’s arm. People of good conscience for generations have struggled with this story’s meaning. Many people sensitive to the plight of abused children recoil in horror at the idea of God pitting Abraham against Isaac in this way.
Theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that the message of this story has nothing to do with obedience—especially obedience to what appears to be an arbitrarily violent God. The message here is that Abraham has already come to trust God so thoroughly that Abraham knows instinctively that something else is afoot. Brueggemann locates in this story the first human inkling of resurrection.
“Resurrection concerns the keeping of a promise when there is no ground for it,” Brueggemann writes. “Faith is nothing other than trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance. Abraham knows beyond understanding that God will find a way to bring life even in this scenario of death.”27
The story of Abraham lays the groundwork for the most fundamental elements of what will become both the Christian narrative and the Christian faith. It all centers on the boldest claim that human beings can make: that there is something at work that is bigger than we are, and the essence of that something is bound up in love. What it requires of us, first and foremost, is a willingness to demonstrate our perception of that love—our faith in that love—by diving headlong, again and again, into the potent mix of risk and trust.
People struggling under the weight of oppression have long recognized that God is not to be found in the taskmaster who holds the whip. Rather, God is found in the long arc “that bends toward justice,” as Martin Luther King Jr. said.28 When people who claim to be following Jesus participate in holding that whip, against any group, something is very, very wrong. It is a violation of everything we Christians profess to believe. Our call is to risk unknown consequences in pursuit of what we are supposed to know beyond understanding: that God will bring life, even in scenarios that challenge us to our core. That call does not end—in fact, it becomes more demanding—when one wields power over the lives and well-being of others.
It is not a surprise that LGBTQ communities have made such progress establishing moral credibility while growing numbers of people have simultaneously dismissed Christian authority as hypocritical and hollow. If you open your eyes to see a young person doing the bold work of naming hir sexual identity, and you observe a person “of faith” holding a spiritual knife over that young person’s soul, it is impossible not to see that the young person is doing what the church is supposed to be doing: trusting, risking, for the sake of love. This is exactly the moment when the church is supposed to hear the voice of God saying, “Put the knife down. This child is innocent.” If this is a test, it is not a test of the child. Nor, I am convinced, is it a test to see if people of faith will cling rigidly to a few obscure passages of scripture. If it is a test, it is a test of faith, and far too many Christians are failing it.
It is true that LGBTQ communities have struggled mightily with the impulse to keep certain members down, invisible, for fear of compromising our overall progress or our individual security. Our work is not complete. An honest person recognizes that it never will be complete, at least not in human time. What LGBTQ people have going for us is that we have long had prophets of extraordinary moral courage in our ranks, prophets who try to pay attention not just to our sexual identities, but also to other particularities that afford privilege or exact vulnerability. One sees that courage clearly on display in the stories of people like Caleb Orozco of Belize, who has endured assault and death threats for working to overturn his country’s law that criminalizes same-sex sexual activity. Or David Kato, an openly gay African man and founder of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) who was murdered in his home on January 26, 2011. Or in the prophetic witness of our allies the Reverend John Makokha and his wife, Anne Baraza, who run Other Sheep Afrika-Kenya, an LGBTI ecumenical organization that preaches openly and honestly about the African male sex industry, religious homophobia and transphobia, social injustice, and HIV/AIDS. Americans Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Caitlyn Jenner have used their success and the global influence of the US media to tell their stories, boldly building awareness and understanding of trans* identity. Our prophets include people who are famous, and people who live next door. They are the countless activists who have refused to be invisible and silent in India, Russia, Brunei, Egypt, Britain, the United States, or . . . just spin the globe and let your finger drop on a country that is crucifying its queer children.
Look around. The courage is breathtaking. But honestly, nowhere does one see acts of voluntary, intentional, courageous risking like those demonstrated by God Hirself. This is what God models to us by creating the universe at all, by creating us, creatures in Hir own image, with agency to love God back—or not. God doesn’t just set up some arbitrary rule for us: “Risk is the verb form of faith. I demand this of you!” No, God lives this. God risks Godself in order to connect to us, God’s creatures. Christianity asserts that God goes even further, showing up as an infant. Talk about risk. That baby is risk incarnate.
Why does God do this?
To try to glimpse the answer, we have to dig deeper. Scary and dangerous as risking is, it is not an end in itself. Not for God, not for us. Risk is the means to the even scarier, more dangerous, and ultimately more desirable end: the ability to connect with others, the ability to touch and be touched.